I love watching Korean TV commercials.
When I first came here, there weren’t many of them, with networks opting for long breaks of CGV Home Shopping instead.
That confused me at first. I couldn’t understand why the channel that had shown a movie the night before was now a shopping channel. Eventually I discovered the count-down clock that told viewers how long until the movie would resume.
The concept of the 30 second commercial was so new that many of my students didn’t understand what I meant. It seems that the higher numbered channels, say 40 and above, added commercials first, with the bigger networks all sticking with the home shopping format until the model was proven to work.
Watching Korean TV commercials is educational. One type of commercial, anywhere in the world, is aspirational, meaning that it shows a lifestyle that the targeted viewer is supposed to aspire to and hopefully achieve by using the proffered product.
Lately Korean aspirational commercials have focused on household appliances. what makes them interesting is that invariably, the household is in fact a house with a front yard, and not an apartment. Almost no Koreans live in houses, and I’ve had students tell me that they would not want to live in a house because “no one is around you,” so, promoting this lifestyle would seem to be promoting a big jump in public consciousness.
Conversely, while researching this article (well, looking for videos of the ads I mention below), I came across a doctoral thesis about how Korean ads are lagging behind public awareness on gender issues. I’m not sure how that applies to housing issues, but I had thought that the ads were leading the public on housing, when maybe they aren’t. Maybe there is a pent up demand for western-style housing.
One really strange aspect of Korean TV is the use of western music in Korean TV ads. This may not sound like anything too unusual, but I swear they pick the songs without listening to the lyrics.
Three examples for you:
First, TROMM, a company that makes combination clothes washer-dryers. Last year, they had this aspirational TV ad showing how great a woman’s life would be if she had a washer/dryer from Tromm. The music in the background (with clearly audible lyrics) was They by Jem. The part used in the ad was:
Who made up all the rules?
We follow them like fools,
Believe them to be true,
Don't care to think them through
And I'm sorry, so sorry
I'm sorry it's like this
I'm sorry, so sorry
I'm sorry we do this
Not exactly reassuring.
But it gets worse
There was an ad on TV that I could never decipher what it was for. I think it was selling apartments made by Xian. the pictures were all overlaid white fades of text on people in green fields, ending with the logo for Xian. The song playing was 100,000 Fireflies by the Magnetic Fields (actually recorded by someone else who had an even clearer voice.
You could again clearly hear the lyric:
I have a mandolin
I play it all night long
It makes me want to kill myself
But then came the strangest one. I saw and heard it just recently. It was for a new luxury car, the SM7. I knew I had heard the song before, it was used a couple of weeks ago on a TV show when a murderer was contemplating killing his friend. I couldn’t believe that they would use the song in a TV ad, but sure enough, at the end, as this very expensive car is driving away, you can clearly hear the Scissor Sisters sing the chorus of I can’t Decide:
I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
Who picks these songs? I wonder if it’s a foreigner having a joke at the Korean clients or if the clients know and understand the lyrics.
